This is how the likes of Slack, Postman sells, “Hey, 96% of your developers/team are already using it. It makes sense to buy it.”

For enterprises its not usually as simple as sell to the CTO. Some things you need that, if you are AWS or Azure, the CTO and some principle engineer are who you have to convince to move the whole 20k person org over. But for a lot of software its the Line manager or director who is calling the shots, or a division head since division A may use different software than division B.

This works if the users are able to use the product (in this case on their personal device maybe) first, and are part of the same organisation.

But what about cases where the user isn't directly related to the decision maker? Doubly so when it's a hard to justify purchase? (I.e. you're not selling bread or IBM machines.)

For example, say, a keyless entry fob for a car. The driver benefits immensely. The CTO of Ford may probably not even entertain a meeting ("Huh, what does he think, locks are bad or something?! What's wrong with a secure lock?")

Does anyone have any suggestions for how to approach such a situation if you developed the fob and now want to sell it?

  Leadership gives approval for purchase

Be a middle man, charge a percentage like tiktok per sale.

This is a bit of a simplification of how enterprise sales works. A few extra dimensions are sometimes required. For "decision makers" their own personal view of reality may not in fact be accurate. You sometimes must vet that what they tell you (and may in fact believe) actually reflects the actual power dynamics of a big enterprise. There are extra dimensions to consider; The first is: are they in a cost center or are they generating revenue. The second is: are you trying to get new technology adopted or is this considered "standardized". The third is: who might perceive your product as a risk, or a threat to their power? These data points inform your sales strategy both in who you sell to, who you avoid, and when you might choose to engage a particular persona, when to go small and when to go big.

I'll tell you how not to do it.

Require me to give you my contact information just to download something. Have sales people blow up my phone and/or email and ignore polite brush-offs. Keep reaching out to me periodically with requests to have a meeting about how you product can help me.

I don't have buying power, but I do have bitching power and your product will wind up getting bad-mouthed by the whole team eventually. And when the engineer asks us for recommendations, guess what we tell him?

Lookin' at you, Veeam, AWS, and Keyence.

Situations like this are instances of the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Principal%E2%80%93agent_proble...

In this case, corporate management holding the purse strings but their workers (devs) using the actual tools. The solution they offer to founders is to make the user your champion and have them sell your product for you.

"The meta point here is that you're not going to talk to the credit card holder; the user/dev is going to do that for you.

Give them the best possible chance at convincing the leadership. Make them look awesome for even bothering the leadership with a choice like this. Make it obviously awesome for them to decide “yes”. These users/devs are your sales people."

Maybe that works for dev tools with freemium models, but in many industries where this problem arises its just not possible to even get your product in front of the users. Take hospital systems and EHR purchasing where Doctors and Nurses are the users of the EHR day in and day out but it is the hospital administration that ultimately gets to decide which EHR is deployed. How do you get users to be champions of your product if you can't even get it in front of them?

Do what big companies do: sell your user!

Employees, by and large, all share three common desires:

* How do I get promoted?

* How do I get a raise?

* How do I not get fired?

Beyond those common desires are a constellation of more personalized that is specific for each salesperson and the cohort they target (I'm somewhat of an idealist in that I believe people are quite often strongly driven by meaningful non-capitalist, non-realist desires).

In any case, when you're working in enterprise sales, what you have to realize is that what your corporate champion is "buying" is a way for them to achieve their goals and only incidentally what is good for the company, where your product is merely a proxy to accomplishing this.

Of course, companies also know this and anyone who has owned a P&L immediately recognizes that the sum of all things everyone wants far exceeds the resources of the balance sheet, thus, some selection process needs to be put in place to allocate scarce resources.

Your corporate champion is ideally far more aligned with you against the company than they are with the company against you and your job is to figure out how to win this selection battle together.

The core insight though, is that people are actually astonishingly bad at performing on this and it's actually quite easy for an outside sales person to become a subject matter expert for 3 core reasons:

1. Any employee usually only ever has a sample size of 1 whereas you have a broader peek into how this has happened across a range of companies industry wide.

2. Any employee, only a minor part of their job involves interfacing with outside parts of the firm responsible for allocating resources whereas you treat this as a core competency.

3. For any person, it's always easier to advise a 3rd party on what to do than to practice the same actions yourself.

What this means though, is that, as an enterprise salesperson, you should understand that your core value comes from developing subject matter expertise in how to help people in your industry get promotions, get raises and avoid getting fired and the product you're representing at the moment is merely the avenue through which you enable that to happen.

The best salespeople I've ever met always share a common core value that they deeply care about making sure everyone around them is getting rich with the faith that some of that money eventually reflects onto them but that's not what drives them. That's why so many immigrants and children of immigrants make such great salespeople, they've seen the material difference wealth has made on their circumstances and they want to spread that opportunity to others.

This is what I advise Founders who start Enterprise focused businesses. Fundamentally, you should be thinking about how do I get someone to VP/Director/Line Manager/Tech Lead 2/3/5 years earlier than if my product doesn't exist and how do you breathe this passion day in day out.